


Revisions Which A Minute Will Reverse

by met_a_mawr_fuh_sis, thirty2flavors



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Dimension Cannon, Episode: s04e11 Turn Left, F/M, Parallel Universes, au kinda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-28
Updated: 2015-02-04
Packaged: 2018-03-09 12:33:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3249839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/met_a_mawr_fuh_sis/pseuds/met_a_mawr_fuh_sis, https://archiveofourown.org/users/thirty2flavors/pseuds/thirty2flavors
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From a dingy hotel in Norway, the Doctor and Rose realize something has gone wrong. A timey-wimey interpretation of Turn Left.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> We say "AU", but it could maybe be canon if you disregard a line or two in JE and squint a little. The title is a line from T S Eliot's "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock", because we're trendy like that, apparently. This is much more than a recap of Turn Left.

_Donna pushes through the crowds of Shan Shen, hands shoved in her pockets. There is so much to see. One table is loaded down with rows and rows of delicate silver and bronze bells and another stall is stacked with crates of sticky sweet fruits. There are stacks of vibrant fabrics, piles of jewellery, cans, candles, and jars full of incense all shaded by huge silk awnings striped in every different hue. The air is spicy and thick, full of smoke and drifting colours. She leaves the Doctor behind her, letting him gesture enthusiastically at a vender in a red velvet cap.  
  
“Tell your fortune, lady?” A woman in a black shawl embroidered with fat golden flowers calls out to her and Donna turns. “Your future predicted, your life foretold.”  
  
She shakes her head, amused. “Ah, no thanks.”  
  
The fortuneteller inclines her head, smiling, “Don't you want to know if you're going to be happy?”  
  
There was a time, Donna thinks, when that line might have worked. “I'm happy right now, thanks.”  
  
“You've got red hair. Reading's free for red hair.” The woman turns and gestures towards her tent, pulling back a sheer curtain of scarlet fabric.  
  
Donna hesitates, and then laughs. “All right, then.” _  
  
\--  
  
The Doctor shoves open his hotel room window and leans his head out as best he can, appreciating the cool, crisp Norway air. The hotel room is by no stretch of the imagination the worst he’s ever been in, but by no means is it the nicest, either; the walls seem cramped and close, the two beds taking up an unnecessary amount of space. The drapes seem to be made from the skins of sofas from the seventies, and he can’t help but wonder what could possibly have been going on in the mind of whoever chose the carpet.  
  
Must be a Donna thought, he thinks. He can’t recall caring about hotel room carpets before.  
  
He takes a deep breath and stares down at the empty expanse of car park below. He’s probably not being fair to the hotel, it must be said. If it were five-star and ludicrously large, the Doctor suspects he would feel just as claustrophobic.  
  
He can’t hear the TARDIS anymore.  
  
Best not to dwell on it, he supposes; he should probably also avoid looking at the little sign attached to the telly that reads ‘Now Offering Over 25 Channels!’ in Norwegian. It seems he’ll being doing all of his own translating these days. Best not to dwell or he’ll go mad long before Rose ever manages to meet his eyes again, let alone “make him better”.  
  
Probably best not to dwell on that, either.  
  
Instead he tilts his head up, squinting up at the dark Norway sky and the stars they’d just helped save. The moon is there, small and silver, the tip of a nail head holding the sky in place. It’s strange, he thinks, the possibility of different stars and different constellations, entire galaxies he’s never properly visited.  
  
He’s known the names of all the stars visible from Earth for virtually as long as he can remember, in Gallifreyan and all of Earth’s languages. He knows the names of the constellations, too, had memorised them long ago as tokens of humanity’s ingenuity and creativity. Struggling to cope with something they didn’t understand, humans told stories -- of mighty gods and reclining queens, snarling animals and powerful weapons. Myths etched into the sky, a cosmic game of connect-the-dots using only pinpricks of distant light and imagination. On Gallifrey, stars had been named for utility, not creativity.  
  
It’s June, so he should be seeing Bootes the ancient huntsmen and Ursa Minor, the drinking cup bejewelled with the North Star. Lupus should be there as well, rising in the east, ominous and hungry. But here, now, those names may be wrong. The stories might be different. Stars may have burnt out or flickered into existence at different times in this Earth’s history. He might even have to buy a book to learn their proper names. The thought in itself is horrifying.  
  
He leans farther out the window, craning his neck to get a better look at the night. The sky is sparse tonight. He counts six stars where there ought to be dozens. Light pollution, he supposes, and then frowns. That can’t be right. The little hotel is far from any major source of light and some of the brightest stars -- Dubhe, Izar, and Segnius, to name a few -- are missing.  
  
A knock on the hotel door sends him flinching uncharacteristically and he hits his head on the windowsill.  
  
“Doctor?”  
  
The sound of Rose’s voice sends a strange shiver down his spine, one he can’t seem to classify as wholly good or bad. She’s been quiet most of the day, reeling no doubt from exhaustion and confusion. It bothers him, how sad she still looks, like she’s been robbed of first place and made to settle for silver. It’s his fault, probably. He’s been selfish. He wonders if he’s done the wrong thing.  
  
You think? snaps a voice in his head that sounds remarkably like Donna Noble. Did it never occur to you that people might like to make their own decisions for once?  
  
“It’s open,” he calls, rubbing his sore head with one hand.  
  
The door creaks as it opens and Rose sticks her head in, cautious and awkward. She’s pinned her fringe back, for what purpose he can’t tell, and the hesitant smile on her face does little to make her look happier. “Mum ordered food to our room, did you want some?”  
  
“Sure.” He pulls back from the window and pauses, beckoning her forward. “Come look at this.”  
  
She shuffles across the room, heavy utilitarian boots making muffled thumps against the fungus coloured carpet, and stands next to him. He nods out the window and watches her face as she studies the sky. “Are there always so few stars out here?”  
  
Rose squeezes closer to him to look out the open window. “Never used to be.” She shrugs. “We lost a lot of them.”  
  
The Doctor frowns and gives his ear a tug. “Well, yeah, except they should be back. The Reality Bomb never happened so it should be like they were never gone.”  
  
She frowns out the window, shaking her head in disbelief. “But we stopped it,” she says. “Donna stopped it.” She looks at him, seeking confirmation, her voice increasingly frantic. “We were there, we saw her, she stopped it!”  
  
The Doctor says nothing, staring instead at the inky blackness where there ought to be spots of light. He hears Rose sigh, shaky, before she pulls herself together and straightens up.  
  
“Right.” She stands straighter, meets his eyes and squares her shoulders, channelling the determined energy he’s missed so much. “So something’s wrong. What do we do?”  
  
His hand runs through his hair as he paces back and forth across the small room. “This cannon of yours, is that in London?”  
  
She nods, curt and quick. “Yeah, it’s at Torchwood.”  
  
“Right. Think I’d better take a look. You still got that dimension hopper?”  
  
“Yeah.” She pulls the device from her pocket and stares at it. “But it’s only good for one person, and even with Mum’s we’ve only got two of them.”  
  
The Doctor grins. He pulls the screwdriver from his pocket and waves it back and forth. “Oh, nothing a little jiggery-pokery can’t fix.”  
  
If she notices the allusion, she ignores it. Instead she looks at the screwdriver in surprise, her brow furrowing suspiciously. “Did you steal that?”  
  
“Oi! How could I steal my own screwdriver?” She doesn’t answer and the Doctor waves a hand. “Anyway, no, it’s a spare. Two suits, two screwdrivers. Much more convenient. Wouldn’t want to go forgetting it. Broke it, once, when I first met Martha, huge inconvenience there, and by then I was already wearing the blue suit — do you like the blue? — and so when I made a new one I thought, might as well make two, that way–”  
  
“Doctor.” Her eyes are wide and he chooses to believe she’s just very successful at suppressing her smile. “The stars?”  
  
He snaps his mouth shut and nods. “Stars, yes. Come on, we’d better get your mother, can’t go leaving her in a hotel in Norway, we’d never hear the end of it.” He bounds to the doorway and pauses, turning to find her frozen by the window pale face tilted up towards the sky. Her hand clenches the windowsill, knuckles white with tension and strain.  
  
“Rose?”  
  
She gives herself a shake. “I’m fine.” She moves to the door and slips past him into the hall. “Once more unto the breach!”  
  
Her smile is a familiar mixture of resignation and determination, and the Doctor can’t help but notice that she doesn’t take his hand.  
  
\--  
  
Toshiko Sato drums her fingers on her desk and chews on one thumbnail. It’s a habit she only lets herself indulge in while in the deepest throes of concentration, but as she’s spent much of her time these past few months concentrating, her nails have been whittled to virtually nothing. She pulls the thumb from her mouth and frowns at it.  
  
Something’s gone wrong. Hours ago, word had filtered through the grapevine that Rose Tyler was back, in Norway of all places, with the day sufficiently saved. Champagne corks had been popped and most of Tosh’s coworkers had left the building, intent on celebrating the end of the end of the multiverse. Tosh had only been heading to lock up her lab before joining them when she’d noticed something very strange.  
  
The Dimension Cannon was still on.  
  
“It’s fine,” Adeola had insisted, tugging at her arm. “Forget about it. Maybe it’ll keep working. You can’t expect to know everything about this stuff.” When Tosh had refused to budge, Adeola shook her head and left on her own. “Honestly, you’re almost as obsessed with this thing as Tyler.”  
  
The problem was — is — that Tosh herself designed the Dimension Cannon, with some helpful assistance from one Malcolm Taylor. She knows the machine inside and out, and she knows that there are many things about this that don’t make sense.  
  
Firstly, it shouldn’t still be working; from what she and Malcolm could best make out, it was whatever was taking out the stars — the Darkness, as Torchwood had nicknamed it — that allowed the cannon to run. The how or why had been unclear, but Rose had reasoned several times that the Darkness must be weakening the walls that separated one universe from another. Their hypothesis had been that when the job was done — when the Darkness was stopped and Rose was back where she wanted to be — the Cannon would stop working, simply shut itself off in the same bizarre way it had turned itself on.  
  
Now, the Darkness has been defeated and the Cannon still works. Tosh supposes it’s possible that they’ve guessed wrong, except…  
  
Well, she and Malcolm are quite clever — not that she likes to brag.  
  
It figures, she supposes, that he would choose this time to stop answering his mobile. Probably he’s off celebrating. She sighs and narrows her eyes across the room at the Cannon, willing it to take pity on her as its creator and impart some helpful wisdom.  
  
It doesn’t. Frustrated, Tosh chews the nail on her pinky finger.  
  
The other issue, of course, is that Rose Tyler is back in the first place. In its initial conception, the Cannon was to be a one-way street, a way to launch Rose back to the universe she came from without destroying the fabric of reality or anything equally dramatic. That Rose would find her intended universe and then come back… well, it didn’t quite add up.  
  
Tosh has just moved on to her ring finger’s nail when a bright flash behind her sends her leaping to her feet in alarm. Spinning, Tosh finds herself face-to-face with Rose and Jackie Tyler and a man in a blue suit.  
  
Tosh stares.  
  
“Hi,” Rose says, and Tosh thinks she sounds about as tired as she did when she left.  
  
The man surveys the room and the corner of his mouth tilts up in a smile.  
  
“Told you it would work. How’s that for accuracy? Oh, I am good.” He pulls what seems to be an oversized penlight and shines it at the hopper in his hand. There’s whirring sort of noise and then he tosses the hopper to Jackie. “There you go, that’ll take you home. Sleep tight.”  
  
Jackie catches it and scowls. “If this lands me in the wrong spot, I’m gonna kill you.” Her expression softens as it falls on Rose. “You be careful, sweetheart.”  
  
Rose’s lips twitch, though she doesn’t smile. “Yeah. Go home, Mum.”  
  
Jackie Tyler disappears in another flash of light.  
  
With barely a cursory glance at Tosh, the man bounds across the room to the Cannon. He peers curiously at it, leaning in and squinting, his free hand groping around in his pocket and seeming to come up short. He twists and turns to inspect the machine from every imaginable angle, making occasional appreciative or disparaging noises, and Toshiko finally finds her voice.  
  
“I’m sorry, who are you?”  
  
He spares a quick glance over the shoulder and wiggles his fingers in greeting. “I’m the Doctor. Hello!” And then he directs his attention back to the Cannon.  
  
Tosh is distantly aware of how rude she’s being when her eyes go wide.  
  
He can’t possibly mean he’s the Doctor.  
  
Tosh had done her very best to focus on building the Cannon itself, rather than go hunting for the details of the back-story. Still, it is impossible to work for Pete Tyler’s Torchwood and not know things about his daughter-who-isn’t, or the omnipotent, time-travelling alien she’s determined to get back to. What Tosh knows about the Doctor is little more than that — a powerful, genius alien with a spaceship that could travel through time.  
  
It was hard not to romanticise such a story — lovers locked away in different worlds, fighting to find each other again. It sounded like a fairy-tale. Facing them now, the Doctor a scrawny bloke in a slightly deplorable blue suit and Rose looking anything but overjoyed, Tosh finds the simile to be lacking.  
  
She glances at Rose only to find she’s moved to look out the window.  
  
“We think something’s gone wrong,” Rose explains, meeting Tosh’s curious gaze. “The stars aren’t back yet, but they ought to be.”  
  
“I knew it!” Tosh exclaims, and then instantly feels silly when her enthused outburst earns her startled looks from both the Doctor and Rose. “It’s just — I mean, they said you were back and that you’d done it, but when I came in here to lock up the Cannon was still running and I thought, that shouldn’t be right, if you’d really fixed everything it’d have turned itself off.” She finds the Doctor staring at her and shifts uncomfortably. “I mean, I think, anyway. It was all just theory we were working with, so–“  
  
“You’re right,” he says. “Dimensional retroclosure ought to have rendered this a pretty but ultimately useless hunk of metal.” He looks back at the Cannon and pats the side of it. “It’s a clever machine, but it’s not powerful enough to rip through the walls of the universe. Not without help, anyway.”  
  
Tosh shrugs. “Well, we didn’t want to collapse the universe.”  
  
The Doctor raises one eyebrow. “How considerate of you.” He rotates on his heel to look at Rose. “Rose, how many worlds did you go through to find the right one?”  
  
“Dozens,” Rose says. She sounds tired — a far cry, Tosh thinks, from the woman who’d taken a very large gun and set off to save the world. Rose drags her gaze away from the window and the empty night sky to look at him. “It was awful. Most of them…” She shrugs and folds her arms across her chest. “Most of them were terrible, especially the ones without organizations like Torchwood. All sorts of things happened because there was no one to stop them from happening, worlds in panic because the stars were going out and they didn’t know why.” She lowers her eyes and addresses the floor. “I couldn’t help any of them. I didn’t have time, I had to find you, we had to stop whatever was causing the Darkness and I couldn’t —“  
  
“You helped Donna,” the Doctor states. He stands metres away from Rose, his hands in his pockets and his face blank, but Tosh feels as though she’s stumbled in on something personal. She’s seen her fair share of office relationships and she’s seen the way they seem to both begin and end with awkward formality and restraint.  
  
Rose shakes her head, closing her eyes and rubbing her thumbs over her eyelids. “What?”  
  
“That parallel world,” he goes on, “with Donna. You helped her; you sent her back to me.” At Rose’s blank stare, the Doctor frowns. “You know, Bad Wolf? Stars are going out?”  
  
Rose drops her hand from her eyes and stares at him. “I don’t know what you mean.”  
  
The Doctor’s brow bends in confusion. “How can you not...?” He narrows his eyes and Tosh gets the impression he’s inspecting something that would be invisible to anyone else. “Unless…” Then, in a split second, his eyes go round as billiard balls and he leaps backward, pointing one hand at Rose enthusiastically. “Oh, yes! That’s it! Classic time loop, oh, that’s brilliant!” He grabs his hair with both hands and Tosh takes solace in the fact that Rose looks just as bewildered as she is.  
  
“Classic what?” asks Rose. She shoves herself away from the windowsill and takes a step towards him with narrowed eyes.  
  
“You mean like in films?” Tosh folds her arms across her chest and frowns in thought. “She doesn’t remember because it hasn’t happened for her yet, but you do, because for you it has?”  
  
“Exactly!” His enthusiasm falters for a second and he frowns. “Oh, I hope that’s not becoming a trend.”  
  
“You’d think it would happen a lot,” Tosh reasons. “I mean, with time travel and everything.”  
  
He grins at her and Tosh can’t help but think he looks a little mad. “Yeah, bit of an occupational hazard.”  
  
“If that’s the case,” says Tosh, and she can feel the pieces clicking together, “then we just need to–“  
  
“Close the loop,” the Doctor finishes. “Shouldn’t be too bad, really, just got to–“  
  
Rose sucks in a breath through her teeth, and the Doctor snaps his mouth shut. “If it’s something I’ve got to do, you gonna tell me what it is?”  
  
Abashed, the Doctor sends one last awkward look in Tosh’s direction before he turns to Rose. “Right. Yes. Sorry.” He runs a hand through his hair, leaving it in more disarray than before; Tosh is suddenly reminded of a rooster. “Just before the Earth was stolen I took Donna to a market on Shan Shen. She wandered off, of course, everyone always wanders off, and wound up in trouble with a member of the Trickster’s Brigade — sort of… changes an event in someone’s timeline. It’s a minor thing, usually, but with Donna it created a brand new parallel world, one where she’d never met me.”  
  
“But she met me,” Rose says.  
  
“Oh, yes.” He nods and then waffles, waving one hand back and forth. “Not that she knew it was you. Of course, not that she’d have known it was you even if she knew it was you, because she didn’t know you because she didn’t know me.”  
  
“Right.” The ready way Rose nods along gives Tosh the impression that the Doctor’s explanations are frequently this… elaborate. “And what did I do when she met me though she didn’t know that she met me?”  
  
“No idea!” He smiles regretfully at the admission but shrugs his shoulders. “Donna couldn’t remember. But I know what you must have done. Somehow you reversed it; you went back to where the timeline went wrong and you set it right.”  
  
“Can’t you send me there right away? Stop it before it happens?”  
  
The smile drops from the Doctor’s face as he shakes his head. “No — first because we don’t know when that is, and second because Donna has to remember you. She remembers you and tells me and we head back to Earth.”  
  
Tosh watches as Rose nods along, and finds herself reminded again of why Rose had slipped to the upper echelons of Torchwood for reasons that had nothing to do with her last name. She’s clever and quick and ready for anything, adaptable and determined. She looks the way she had when she’d left Torchwood only hours ago for what everyone presumed to be the last time — battle-ready and world-weary.  
  
The look on the Doctor’s face is similar.  
  
“So I’ve got to… get there,” Rose says, slowly, reasoning it out, “meet Donna, and then travel back in time. Somehow. You don’t know how I do it, but you know that I do.”  
  
He gives her a ghost of a grin. “Now you’ve got it.”  
  
“Your ship?” Tosh suggests, and hopes she doesn’t sound too eager. The possibility of getting a glimpse of the time machine Rose had lovingly described makes Tosh just the slightest bit giddy.  
  
But the Doctor and Rose stare at her like she’s brought up a lost loved one, and the Doctor shakes his head. “No ship,” he says softly. Then, evidently aware of the drop in his enthusiasm, he breaks into a grin and bounds to close the gap between himself and the Cannon, patting the machine affectionately. “We’ll use this.” He pulls the penlight back out of his pocket and looks over at Rose. “You ready?”  
  
Rose responds with the sort of grin that matches the phrase “grin and bear it”. “As I’ll ever be.”  
  
Tosh takes a step forward, watching as the Doctor shines the penlight on the Cannon’s control panel. “Sorry, it’s just — it took us weeks to find the right universe and to get Rose there on time.” She leaves unspoken the implication that they can’t possibly have enough time.  
  
The Doctor shrugs her off. “That was different.”  
  
Tosh furrows her brow, feeling very much as though she’s missing something important. “How?”  
  
He pauses, looks up, and then his mouth cracks into a grin. “This time you’ve got me.”  
  
And then, much to Tosh’s horror, he rips open the Cannon’s control panel.  
  
\--  
  
 _Donna dashes out into the street along with everyone else, elbowing her way through the crowd. The December air is cold and damp, a marked change from the heat of the bar. People are shouting, staring up at the night sky.  
  
“What the hell is that?” her mate Mooky shouts, pointing up at a large star that is gliding over the rooftops, humming and crackling with bright white electricity.  
  
“Ken Livingston, that's what - spending our money on decorations…” Veena mutters, and then add, louder, “I mean, how much did that cost?”  
  
Mooky looks over at her incredulously. “Don't be so stupid, Veena, it's flying! It's really flying!”  
  
As the star drifts across the sky, the crowd follows.  
  
“That's not a star,” Donna says, suddenly certain. “That's a web. It's heading east... the middle of the city.” Donna’s stomach is turning nervously, an ominous feeling pressing up against her throat. There’s a funny feeling in the back of her head, like déjà vu.  
  
Her back twitches, and Donna shakes herself. Suddenly, the web erupts, shooting lightning bursts of electricity into the city. In the distance, Donna can hear screams and explosions as smoke rises up over the city and the crowd panics. All around her the street empties, but Donna is frozen in place, adrenaline surging through her body. She becomes aware of Alice hovering behind her.  
  
“Alice. There's a great big web-star thing shooting at people, and you're looking at me?”  
  
Alice’s voice is thin and frightened. “There's something on your back.” The white of her eyes glisten in the dark as she whispers again, “There’s something on your back!”  
  
Alice bolts, but Donna ignores her, taking a few hesitant steps towards the direction of the star, her heart slamming frantically into her ribcage. She starts to run, pulled forward by curiosity and something else as well, some strange sort of magnetism Donna can’t explain.  
  
Behind her, Veena shouts frantically. “Donna! Where are you going? You're going to get yourself killed! Donna!”  
  
Donna runs. _  
  
\--  
  
Rose smells the river before she sees it. A great muddy trench is sitting where the Thames should be. The bottom, illuminated dimly by light from the city, is lined with thick drifts of silt and bits of debris: broken pieces of ships, old tires stuck fast in thick sludge, and great chunks of concrete. It stinks. A corner of her mouth turns up in wry amusement. Leave it to the Doctor to drain the Thames on Christmas Day.  
  
It is cold. She shivers, swallowing the taste of nausea that always wells up in the back of her throat whenever she makes a jump. The first time she had shifted, she had been sick all over the street. Rose gives a cursory look around. Far off she can hear the plaintive wail of an ambulance siren even though the area where she is standing is deserted. In the distance, she can see a small gathering of army jeeps and soldiers in bright red berets. Rose shivers again. UNIT. Something is definitely going on; she just doesn’t have the slightest idea what she is supposed to do about it.  
  
The Doctor hadn’t given her much to go on, just told her that somehow Donna’s timeline had been pushed off course, creating an entirely different universe. He had also mumbled something about giant spiders, draining the Thames, and travelling back in time. He had it made it all seem relatively simple, but that didn’t mean that whatever she was supposed to accomplish was going to be easy. Now, it seems, this is her mess to fix.  
  
Fantastic.  
  
She is tired, so tired, and everything has happened so quickly. Last night she was on a beach in Norway, sharing a hotel room with her mum. The night before that, she was a prisoner in a Dalek dungeon. Tonight she is standing on yet another parallel world, fighting to keep the stars from going out -- again. The Doctor, Jack, dark skies, dimension cannons, Sarah Jane, her mum, Mickey, Daleks, guns, force fields, Armageddon, and windy beaches —  
  
It is almost too much. She can feel herself bending under the weight, but she cannot break. She has to find Donna Noble, a woman she hardly knows, and tell her that the Doctor needs her. But how?  
  
Rose sighs and looks up at the sky that, in this universe anyway, is still full of stars. Well, at least they have some time then.  
  
Something beeps in her pocket, startling her, and she pulls out a small smooth metal cylinder from her jacket, slightly confused. She shakes it and it rattles slightly, the outside casing heats up and beings to glow pale gold. It is her TARDIS detector, one of the first things she had asked Tosh and Malcolm to design for her. It is meant to alert her to the presence of the TARDIS if it is within a six-kilometre distance. It has never worked before. To be fair, she had never really needed it before.  
  
The device is flashing red, now, and that means the Doctor, the real Doctor, is nearby. A familiar surge of adrenaline rushes through her, followed by something bittersweet. Maybe she can find him, explain what has happened, and -- but that will create a paradox, won’t it? Then again, aren’t they already in a paradox or a time loop or whatever it was the Doctor, the other one, had called it? What would happen if she found him now, after she had already seen him, after he had already left her again? Surely once they were safe in the TARDIS he could fix everything. She could explain…  
  
Abruptly, she is hit by a sharp pang of something that feels suspiciously like guilt. If she finds the Doctor now, will the other Doctor cease to exist? Is that like killing, or more like merging two halves back into one whole? She runs her fingertips across her lips, remembering how it had felt to kiss him, his arms wrapped around her, the taste of salt and longing burning her mouth. When he had whispered in her ear, when he had said those words...  
  
But it — this — isn’t what she wants. It isn’t what she had planned, what she had worked towards for so many years. The other Doctor isn’t the real Doctor; he’s not her Doctor, although, she admits, he certainly has the gob. This new Doctor, well, he moves like the proper Doctor, seems to think like the Doctor, his lips and hair and the smattering of freckles across his face are all the same. He even smells the same, like rain and electricity.  
  
He’s not the same man, though. Couldn’t be. He’s just some sort of advanced copy. A fluke. He'd grown out of hand, for God’s sake.  
  
Unbidden, the image of her first Doctor pops into her mind -- a heavy leather jacket that always smelled faintly of smoke, shining blue eyes set deep into the folds of his face, a manic infectious grin, calloused hands that were rough to the touch, but strangely gentle. He had told her once that he would forgive her anything, if she only asked. Would he forgive her this?  
  
The TARDIS detector continues to flash in her hand. She looks at it for a moment longer, shoves it back in her pocket, and starts to run.


	2. Chapter 2

When Rose gets back, the first thing the Doctor notices is the way her right hand trembles as it reaches up to brush back through her hair.  
  
  
That can’t be good.  
  
  
“Are you all right?” he asks instantly, stepping forward and scanning her up and down for any other physical signs of distress. “They might be a bit inconsistent, your entries and exits — the universal walls are sort of …  _wobbling_  right now and sometimes it’ll take a bit more force to punch through, but there shouldn’t be any averse affects for you, not physically. Are–”  
  
  
“You  _died_.” She says it slowly and strongly, her hand falling back to her side and clenching into a fist. It takes the Doctor’s brain a split second longer than it should to parse the sentence, and he blinks.  
  
  
“Sorry, what?”  
  
  
“You  _died!_ ” It’s a shout, this time, and she takes a step forward, the trembling seeming to have found a home in her shoulders and upper body. “By the time I got there, you were dead. Not regenerated,  _dead_.”  
  
  
“Oh,” is all the Doctor manages to say, one hand snaking up awkwardly to rub his neck. Perhaps concealing that particular presumption had not been such a clever idea after all.  
  
  
“A world where Donna never met you, you said,” Rose goes on, and the Doctor can see her struggling to keep a handle on her anger. “You sort of failed to mention that she never met you because you were  _dead_!”  
  
  
There’s a painful snap in her voice as she shouts the last word, and the Doctor decides it might be best not to correct her order of causality. Instead, he studies the ground and gives the back of his neck an awkward scratch. “Sorry,” he says briefly, far from interested in a long discussion about his state of mind the first time he’d met Donna Noble. “Listen, we–”  
  
  
“ _Sorry?_ ” When she laughs, it sounds nothing like how he remembers Rose Tyler’s laugh. “Oh, of course you are, you’re always sorry — sorry I can’t save you — sorry I can’t fix this — sorry I never tell you anything important, Rose — sorry I think I know what’s best for everyone, Rose — sorry I don’t trust you to make your own decisions, Rose!” She throws her hands into the air in exasperation and shakes her head. “God, it’s just like ‘impossible’ — do you even know what those words  _mean_ , or do you just like how they sound?”  
  
  
She takes a deep breath then, and the Doctor tries in vain to recall the last time Rose Tyler shouted at him. Years ago, he thinks, maybe even before he regenerated. Unsure what he can say that won’t only incense her further, the Doctor avoids her eyes and holds his tongue.  
  
  
Rose draws a series of shaky breaths, pacing on the spot. In measured tones, she says, “When did you first meet Donna?”  
  
  
The Doctor hesitates. In the corner of his eye he sees Tosh shift, uncomfortable with the tension she’s been thrown into and itching to get back to work. He forces himself to hold Rose’s gaze. “I met Donna at Christmas.”  
  
  
Her eyes narrow. “For you,” she clarifies, the anger still lurking in her voice. “When was it  _for you?_ ”  
  
  
He swallows. “Not long after I’d said goodbye to you.” Faltering under the intensity of her gaze, he amends, “Immediately after I’d said goodbye to you.”  
  
  
Rose snorts and nods her head. “ _Great_.” With one hand she pushes her hair behind her ear and stares up at the ceiling. “Great. So I’ve just got to send Donna back in time so she can stop you from  _topping yourself_.”  
  
  
Her brutal blatancy makes him flinch. “Rose, that wasn’t me.”  
  
  
She meets his eyes and shakes her head. “Could’ve been.” She laughs again. “God, do you know how infuriating that is? One universe you’re leaving me behind and the next you’re offing yourself just because–”  
  
  
“Stop it,” he snaps, and she does, though the glint of challenge doesn’t leave her eyes. “Listen, either we stand here arguing about what I’ve done in other universes and wait for  _every_  universe to tumble in on itself, or we send you back where you need to be to stop that from happening.”  
  
  
She looks away from him, her lips pressing together into a thin, furious line, her eyes trained intently on the wall.   
  
  
“Fine,” she says, her voice controlled and cold. She doesn’t look at him. “Tell me what I need to do.”  
  
  
The Doctor thinks of all his previous arguments with Rose and tries to recall if resolution had ever felt so distant, so out of reach before. Swallowing his sense of dread — and it’s useless, really, to worry about the future before you’ve ensured there’s a future to worry about — the Doctor forces a smile. “You’re going to meet an old friend of mine.”  
  
  
\--  
  
  
It is late, and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart is tired.  
  
He is filled with the kind of weariness that could easily defeat a much younger man, and the Brigadier isn’t young. He is pushing 80, and tonight he feels every one of his years. He is no longer lean as whipcord; in fact, he has grown a considerable paunch. His once neatly trimmed moustache has grown into a full beard and his hair is silver now, not black. His bones ache and creak in protest of the very long night he has just had and he must rely completely on his cane to traverse the short passage from the front door of his house to his office.   
  
Reaching his destination, he firmly closes the door behind him, and then shuffles towards the little table that holds a glinting collection of glass decanters and tumblers. He is not, as a rule, a drinking man, but tonight he will make an exception. Tonight, in fact, he plans on making a very large exception. He cannot remember the last time he was properly soused -- sixty years ago? longer? -- but it hardly matters. What matters now is controlling the shaky feeling that is beginning to form in the pit of his stomach and the lump that is starting to clog his throat.  
  
He sinks into his leather chair, sighing as it creaks and groans under his weight. Leaning his cane against the side of his desk, he takes a large gulp of brandy. Four in the morning on Christmas day, he should be sound asleep, not working his way towards getting drunk. He tugs at his jacket, settling the fabric more comfortably. It feels odd to be back in uniform.   
  
Retirement is not what he thought it would be. It had started out just as he planned, with him shuffling into headquarters on a rare day to go over paperwork or give advice to the younger set, all of whom seem even more eager than he ever was to shoot first and ask questions later. That hadn’t lasted. He had been drafted into being a special envoy, which meant nothing, really just gave UNIT an excuse to send him off on ridiculous missions, load him down with paperwork, and make him attend long hours of debriefing which accomplished nothing and bored him silly.   
  
Taking another drink, he looks at the phone on his desk. He should make some calls. Even at this ungodly hour there are people who would want to know the unhappy news. Liz would want to know, and Jo and Benton of course. He still keeps in touch with all of them, though not as much as he would like. There were others he would need to tell as well, Tegan, and Sarah Jane Smith — an insufferably nosy woman, but pleasant enough and very helpful to have around in a tight spot. Yes, they would all want to know, and it wasn’t the kind of news he should let come to them second hand.   
  
The Doctor, dead, drowned fighting Arachnids underneath the Thames. It doesn’t seem real.   
  
Though the Doctor had been exasperating and they had had more arguments than cordial conversations over the years, the Brigadier had respected the man, been fond of him even. Yes, they had been friends once, long ago in the days when things had been more clear-cut, before super computers, before stealth jets created with alien technology, before Torchwood’s meteoric rise from history and subsequent tumble from grace. Man had not even set foot on the moon when he had first met the Doctor, a comical figure in tartan pants with perpetual tea stains on his shirtfront. The Brigadier had taken him for a fool, but then he had seen the sharp intelligence in those blue eyes and he had known that this was not a man to be taken lightly, whatever his eccentricities. Time had seemed to pass much more quickly after that first meeting, and now here he is an old man, fighting off osteoporosis instead of Yetis and Cybermen.   
  
He imagines that they will all be much worse off without the Doctor. For the first time since he received a frantic phone call last evening informing him that London was being bombarded by a giant Christmas Star, the Brigadier wants to put down his head and cry. He cannot remember the last time he wished to do so.   
  
The Doctor, dead.   
  
There is a pile of notes detailing missed phone calls on his desk, all penned in his wife Doris’ lopsided handwriting. Torchwood, it seems, has been calling his home incessantly, though he’s sure that this number is unlisted.   
  
Well, damned if he’ll call Torchwood back. The last thing he desires is to get into an argument with Jack Harkness over pissing rights. He has read ‘Captain’ Jack’s file and not been overly impressed. He has always had a strong distaste for Torchwood on principal. They have always been sloppy and undisciplined, particularly when judging by the Canary Wharf disaster six months ago... pompous people mucking about with things they don’t understand. Frankly, he doesn’t think much of a secret organization that drives around in a jeep with their name emblazoned boldly on the side.  
  
The Doctor is dead, and now the Brigadier must clean up the Doctor’s mess. Some explanation must be thought up to explain the Thames disaster. Someone must make the proper calls, clear the proper channels. There will be time to grieve later. He reaches for the phone.   
  
A moment later, before he even has a chance to dial, a woman suddenly shifts into existence in front of his desk. The Brigadier knocks his glass over in surprise, the tumbler shatters and liquid seeps over the hard floor.   
  
She is young and slim; a purple leather jacket zipped up under her chin. Her face reveals nothing, her expression is smooth and composed, but there are large dark circles smudged under her red-rimmed eyes. Though she appears to be nearly as tired as he feels, there is something hard about her, a squared set to her shoulders that the soldier in him recognizes and very nearly approves off.   
  
“I’m sorry for startling you, Brigadier,” she says abruptly, “but I had to see you and we thought it best if I didn’t have to deal with... well, all the complications it would have caused if I approached you at a UNIT base.”  
  
His hand automatically reaches out for the reassurance of his cane and the pistol that he keeps concealed within it. His voice is low and as steady as he can make it, “Who the blazes are you and how the devil did you get in here?”   
  
She ignores both of his questions and his indignation. “We… I need your help, Brigadier.”   
  
His hand hovers next to his cane. “Be that as it may, that still does not explain your sudden appearance in my home...”  
  
Her gaze is steady and unblinking. “It’s about the Doctor.”  
  
This throws him off guard for only a moment before he recovers. “If you’re from Torchwood, you can tell Captain Jack Harkness that all information regarding the incident tonight is classified. And I feel I must inform you, young lady, that I don’t particularly appreciate social calls in the middle of the night.”  
  
She doesn’t respond to his reprimand, but he think he sees a glint of amusement flicker briefly in her eyes before it is gone again. “This is important.”  
  
He waits, his eyes narrowed, assessing what kind of threat she is or could be. She appears to be unarmed and alone, but the Brigadier knows that appearances can be very deceiving.   
  
She continues calmly, but he can see that her hands are clenched into tight fists by her sides. “I need your help Brigadier. None of this was supposed to happen. The Doctor wasn’t supposed to die this way. He wasn’t supposed to die at all.”  
  
“Well, the circumstances are certainly regrettable...”  
  
She cuts him off in a rush of breath, her eyes bright, blood suddenly rushing into her face. “No, you don’t understand! This — this is wrong! All of it!” Her outburst startles even her and she looks at him in surprise, her mouth slightly open. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shout. It’s been a long day,” she whispers and then sinks boneless into one of the chairs in front of his desk.   
  
It is, this moment of weakness, which sways him to hear her out, instead of immediately calling for help.   
  
The Brigadier eases himself up from his desk, steps around the broken glass on the floor, and shuffles across the room, pouring her a large dose of brandy from his store. It seems that he is not the only one who is in need of a drink tonight. Handing it to her, he returns to his desk. “Now, Miss...?”  
  
“I’d prefer not to use my name.”  
  
“May I ask why not?”  
  
The woman takes a large swallow of brandy and then sits the glass on his desk. “You may ask.”  
  
“But you won’t tell me.”   
  
She shrugs, her expression set and stubborn.   
  
He sighs and folds his hands together in front of him. “What, exactly, do you think an old man like me can do to help you?”  
  
“I want to see the TARDIS.”  
  
Her answer is so sudden and prompt that he is very nearly surprised. “What makes you think we have it?”  
  
Her eyebrows come together in frustration and her lips form a thin line of displeasure. “Don’t play games with me, Brigadier. I’m being as honest as I possibly can without fracturing a hole in reality.”  
  
“I am hardly the one playing games, young lady. You are the one who refuses to even tell me your name.” He can hear the frustration in his tone and makes an effort to reign in his temper. “I think I am being very reasonable indeed. Even if we did have the TARDIS, and even if I could manage to bring you to it, you couldn’t get in it. Only the Doctor was ever able to open it.”  
  
She says nothing, but reaches inside of her jacket and pulls out a length of silver chain that is looped around her neck. Dangling from the chain is a plain metal key.  
  
He looks at her for a long moment, then picks up the phone on his desk and presses the bright red button that is embossed with UNIT’s insignia. “Yes, Harris. Have Jenkins pull the car around.”  
  
++  
  
The drive is short, the night still cold and clear, though the morning is quickly approaching.  
  
When they arrive, the woman jumps lightly out of the car and he follows, waving away Jenkins, who has rushed round to help him out. These young fools all think he could break at any moment. He may be old, but he is not made of glass, he can manage climbing from a car perfectly well on his own.  
  
She waits slightly ahead of him, her hands shoved deep into the pockets of her jacket, her shoulders straight and rigid. The UNIT compound he has brought her too is not large, just a smattering of warehouses alongside what used to be the Thames. He can see Captain Magambo and four more soldiers waiting for them in the distance, guarding the door to an unassuming warehouse near the centre of the compound. Even from here, he can see that Magambo’s uniform is immaculately pressed. Her red beret is a bright spot in the darkness, a violent splash of blood red against the dim dawn. She is a good soldier, but she is, overall, a bit too fond of rules and regulations for his taste.  
  
She salutes smartly when they walk up to her and then folds her hands neatly behind her back, addressing him, “We were told not to expect you until later in the day, Sir.”  
  
“I’ve come a little early. Is it contained?”  
  
“Yes, Sir. No one has been allowed in the building since it arrived.”  
  
“Good, good. We’ll go in now.” The four men behind her exchange looks with one another, shifting restlessly. The Brigadier notices one clutch his gun a little bit tighter.   
  
He sees Magambo’s sharp eyes flick briefly to the woman behind him. “Authorized personnel only, Sir.”  
  
“Are you questioning my judgement?”  
  
She hesitates and he can see her dilemma. He is retired, a civilian now, despite his uniform and for all of his special envoy status, and her orders, no doubt, have come from much farther up then he would care to think about.   
  
“No, Sir,” she says eventually.  
  
“Good. Now call off your dogs, Captain. There is work to be done.”  
  
Magambo nods and steps aside, the men behind her following her example. Jenkins rushes forward and slides the door open, revealing a deep darkness that is unsettling.   
  
As soon as the doors open, the woman pushes past him. Her arm briefly brushes against his, and he jumps involuntarily, shocked. Her touch is electric, as if her entire body is shot through with energy.   
  
The warehouse lights flicker on and the TARDIS stands out in stark blue relief against the dull grey walls.   
  
The machine looks strangely ancient in the bright lights. He watches as she walks up it, briefly resting her cheek against the wooden door. Reaching into her jacket, she pulls out the key and slips it easily into the lock. The door swings open and she disappears. He only hesitates a moment before following his unlikely companion into the depths of the TARDIS.   
  
It is much different. The floor under his feet is metal grating and the walls curve inwards like the interior of a great bronze honeycomb. Twisted pillars rise up from the floor encircling the console, which at least looks close to how he recalls. The lighting, too, has changed; it is dark here now, only a dim aqua glow, rather than the bright white light he remembers. He watches as she runs her hands along the console and then turns to him, her eyes glittering strangely in the alien light.   
  
The TARDIS has always made him uncomfortable. For someone who has dealt with the supernatural his entire life he is still a pragmatic man, and this ship has always felt a bit too much like magic... but still there is something about it, this place, which appeals to him now. Perhaps, after all of these years, he has learned to appreciate a little bit of mystery.   
  
He finds his voice again and is surprised to find it gruff with tears. “Does everything still work?”  
  
She causally flips a few levers, pale hair falling across her face, hiding her expression. “No. She won’t fly again. And, even if she could, I’m not sure I could convince her to. She’s dying.”  
  
“You talk as if it’s alive.”  
  
“She is alive.” Her hand lingers tenderly over one of the buttons. “Maybe not in the same way as you or me... but she’s still alive.”  
  
The Brigadier shivers. “What do you plan on doing now?”  
  
“I’m going to build a time machine and I’m going to fix this.” She sounds so assured, so confident, and her movements are steady - as she reaches up to touch the rotor. It moves slowly in response and a smile flits across her face. “The TARDIS will help.” She turns to him fully. “Will you help me, Brigadier?”  
  
He considers the request, and he considers all that humanity will have to compensate for, now that the Doctor is lost. He nods. “Yes, child, I’ll help you.”  
  
She sighs and sits on the seat facing the console. “Thank you.”   
  
He doesn’t know what to do, whether to leave or to sit next to her. His training, all of his years as soldier are useless here in this place that seems to exist only inside of itself. He moves and sits next to her. The seat is surprisingly comfortable.  
  
“I miss him,” she admits, sounding a little as though she’s imparted some great secret.   
  
“Do you?”  
  
The Brigadier considers the question. “I’m not sure I ever really knew him,” he says, his honesty catching him unaware. “We had so many adventures, but it all seems... well, it all seems a rather long time ago. And he was always so different each time I met him.”  
  
“He spoke of you.” She gives a fraction of a smile as she says it. “He said you were a good man.”  
  
“Did he?”   
  
She doesn’t seem to hear him; instead she stares long and hard at the console.   
  
“I got lost,” she says suddenly. “I fell, through the void and into a parallel world.” She leans forward in her seat to run a hand along the edge of the console, and then lets her flingers slip off the edge. “He couldn’t reach me, couldn’t come for me, and so I came to him. And then there was this war, this terrible war and everything got turned around.” Her lips twitch and she leans back against the seat, staring up into the impossibly vast ceiling. “I told him I’d stay with him forever.”  
  
Her hands tremble where they are clenched in her lap. All traces of the soldier have vanished and the soft light of the TARDIS smoothes her features until only a very young woman remains. He reaches over and takes her hand, doing his best to ignore the electric tingle that travels up his arm. He is not a demonstrative man.   
  
She looks at him, her eyes sliding to the side even as her head stays tilted at its angle. “Do you trust me, Brigadier?”   
  
“I’ll have to.”  
  
“Things are going to get much worse before they get better.” It sounds like a dare.  
  
The Brigadier holds himself a little straighter. “I’ve found that’s often the way of things.”  
  
“I do miss him,” she says again, her expression serious.  
  
The Brigadier nods. “Yes, he was a wonderful chap... all of them.”   
  
She grins, a slow sad smile that lights up her eyes, and squeezes his hand.   
  
\--  
  
  
 _Donna stands next to her mother, her arms folded tightly across her chest. The sky is the pale pink of early dawn, and the breeze is cold and sharp, tangy with the scent of ash. Staff and sleep-tousled guests continue to pour out of the hotel, their eyes wide with fear and disbelief, staring at the dense cloud on the horizon. Grotesquely top heavy, it looms and leans, leering down at the Earth and the people who are looking up at its rolling surface.  
  
  
It almost seems a prank, Donna thinks, a cruel joke, a stupid television program with hidden cameras. Or maybe they are all on the set of some film. Surely, mushroom clouds don’t actually look like that, do they? If this is some setup for one of those practical joke shows, she’s going to kill someone.   
  
  
Her granddad whispers, “I was supposed to be out there selling papers,” and Donna shivers. “I should have been there, we all should. We'd be dead.”  
  
  
Her mum shakes her head. “That's everyone. Every single person we know. The whole City.”  
  
  
She looks from her mother to her grandfather and then back to the horizon. “It can't be,” Donna says, stubborn and determined as always — but then behind her a child starts to cry, and suddenly she realizes that this isn’t a joke. _  
  
  
\--  
  
  
Jack sighs and leans back in his chair, pushing away the pile of papers in front of him. Numbers, words, and graphs spin and swim before his eyes. His head aches and his limbs feel heavy. His brain is buzzing, thoughts shuddering and hopping across its surface, a trickling stream of TV static. He sighs again and rubs his eyes, watching the bright pressure pops that bloom and flash on the back of his eyelids. Opening his eyes, he studies the contents of his desk. There is no computer. He has resisted installing a computer even though he knows that it would be easier to keep track of things. There are enough computers in the hub these days. Stacks of papers, pens, one bitten down stub of a pencil, a box full of jumbled paperclips and rubber bands, the square old fashioned intercom with its row of shiny red buttons, the tiny piece of growing TARDIS coral glows incandescent in its protective electro-magnetic field. Across the room the Doctor’s hand happily burbles and bobs in its tank of bubbles and murky light. He doesn’t know why he bothers to keep it anymore. It’s worthless as a Doctor detector, useless, now that there is no Doctor.   
  
He is restless and tired, a strange contradiction. He doesn’t want to think about the Doctor, doesn’t want to think about the pile of papers in front of him. He pushes everything from his mind, closes his eyes, and lingers in the blank oblivion of space with no worries and no fears and no grief. For a moment, there is only blackness, and his thoughts grow quiet and fade away. Then a spark of flame, a cloud of smoke and he is once more seeing the burnt-out ruins of Torchwood Tower in his minds eye. Panic in the streets, broken glass, cracked pavement, the agonized screams of the semi-converted lying abandoned, all of whom are missing arms, legs, eyes. Most are beyond his help.   
  
And of course the Doctor is gone, vanished into the swirl of the Vortex, leaving Jack alone to clean up the mess, explain away the craters that have been gauged into the Earth. He is left alone to discover Rose Tyler’s name on the list of the dead. It was so small and neat, typed with such cold finality on the stark white page. The tiny black letters had been such an odd contrast to the bright memories he had of her, big grins and wide honey brown eyes that shone like stars in the soft light of the TARDIS.   
  
He opens his eyes and the paperwork in front of him swims back into focus. There is a sour taste in the back of his mouth and he reaches for his mug, taking a large gulp of cold and bitter coffee. Sometimes it feels like much longer than a year a half since Torchwood Tower. Sometimes it feels like his entire life has been replayed in a span of 18 months. Grief, loss, alien invasion, grief, loss, explosion, grief, loss.   
  
Rose. The Doctor, six months later. Owen and Tosh. All gone while he remains, perhaps forever. He tries not to think of all the grey that is slowly spreading throughout his hair, or the tiny lines that have suddenly sprouted from the corners of his eyes and mouth. He tries not to think of what he may become.  
  
The papers in front of him are an amalgamation of UNIT’s activity over the last year and a half. UNIT, headed by some old fogy (who was he calling old, anyway?) Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, had been the first to reach the disaster scene under the Thames. From what Jack had gathered, the man had come out of retirement to mysteriously head up the operation. UNIT had been the ones to pull the Doctor’s body from the rubble on Christmas Day and they had been the ones to find the TARDIS, box it up and ship it off to one of their bases. All traces of the Doctor were gone, efficiently tidied up; the official line being that a major engineering malfunction had drained the Thames. That was all classified information, of course; getting any of it had required no small amount of charm and a large number of favours. UNIT was being very hush-hush these days, even for a top-secret military organization.   
  
Torchwood and UNIT had never had what might be called a close relationship. That relationship had cooled even more after the War between the Daleks and Cybermen. And then there had been the St. John’s incident, the deaths of Owen and Tosh, the full scale replica of the Titanic, the Adipose, not to mention a handful of other things Jack had been powerless to stop. The world quite obviously needed the Doctor and the Doctor had quite obviously needed Rose Tyler. Their deaths had been much too close to one another for Jack to believe it coincidence and now everything was going to shit.   
  
He scans the long line of numbers listed on the pages in front of him, sums tallying work force and materials. What were they building, anyway? And right in the heart of Leeds? It doesn’t make any sense. Repeated attempts to get more information have all been met with the same polite but curt “thanks, but no thanks”. Jack knows what the underlying tone implies, of course - it’s none of his business, and hasn’t Torchwood done enough to muck everything up already?   
  
Jack isn’t sure he can argue with that.  
  
In the past few days he has gotten a few reports that UNIT is on the move again, this time in order to investigate an ATMOS factory. He has suspected for quite some time that ATMOS might have alien origins, but he has never found any hard evidence. He wonders if UNIT will have better luck.  
  
The intercom on his desk buzzes loudly and Gwen’s voice comes rolling through the speaker. “Jack?”  
  
“What is it, Gwen?” He fights to keep annoyance from his tone. He’s told them he doesn’t want to be disturbed.  
  
“There’s someone outside.”   
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
“I  _mean_  there’s someone outside, just standing, in front of the  _top secret invisible_  hub entrance.”  
  
“Probably just a tourist, they’ll go away eventually.” The explanation sounds lame even to him. There are no tourists, not anymore.   
  
“I don’t think so, Jack.” She’s annoyed, he can hear it in her voice. They have all been working too hard for too long.  
  
“Why’s that?”  
  
“Because she’s been staring up at the  _hidden_  security camera for going on ten minutes.”  
  
“Alright, Gwen, I’ll come down and take a look.” The intercom buzzes off and Jack gets up, his knees and back creaking in protest. He has been sitting too long. Giving the Doctor’s hand tank a customary tap on its metal lid, Jack heads down the stairs. Gwen and Ianto are standing in front of Tosh’s old workstation, staring at the security feed.   
  
“How does she know exactly where the camera is?” Ianto asks a tray of dirty dishes balanced precariously on one hand. The dishwasher had broken last week and no one has bothered to fix it. Ianto had taken to washing up in the bathroom sink.   
  
Jack comes up behind them, gently shouldering them aside so that he can get a look at the screen. His stomach drops and rolls, his heart slamming painfully into overdrive.  
  
This is impossible.   
  
The woman on the screen lifts her hand and gives a little wave.   
  
“Now _that_  is definitely unsettling,” Ianto breathes. Together they stare at the woman on the screen, and the woman on the screen inexplicably stares back.  
  
Jack swallows hard and turns toward the lift.  
  
“Jack? Jack, you’re not going up there, are you? We don’t know who she is! She could be dangerous!”   
  
He ignores Gwen, stepping onto the lift and flipping the switch. The hatch above him opens up, flooding the shaft with cool night air that feels good against his skin.   
  
As the lift reaches the top, he finds himself face to face with Rose Tyler.  
  
She has changed dramatically since he last saw her. She is older. Her face has lost its childish roundness. Her hair is lighter, and her body is slimmer, harder. But her eyes are the same.   
  
“Jack.”   
  
Somehow, he finds his voice. “Rose.” He shakes his head. “You’re supposed to be dead.”   
  
She smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “So are you.” The curve of her lips is grim instead of promising. “I need your help, Jack.”   
  
“Of course.” He manages to keep his face stern. “On one condition.”  
  
She is wary now. “And what is that?”  
  
“That you get over here and give me a proper hello.” He holds out his arm and she grins at him, that quick flash of a smile that he remembers so well.   
  
She steps forward and embraces him, her slim arms holding him tightly. He lifts her off her feet so that her shoes dangle above the pavement. Her weight feels solid and familiar in his arms, as if he hugged her only yesterday instead of over a century ago.   
  
He has missed her, more than he would ever admit.   
  
He lets her go, puts her down, holding her at arms length. She is still grinning.   
  
“So what can I do for you, Miss Tyler?”  
  
She raises her eyebrows and tilts her head back, nineteen again for just a second. “We’re going to set the sky on fire, Jack.”  
  
“Just like old times then.”  
  
“Just like.”


	3. Chapter 3

Losing the TARDIS is like losing a limb.

He searches for her in his mind sometimes, reaching for something that isn’t there. It reminds him of the way the universe had seemed too quiet after the Time War, without the constant drone of his people his mind, a sound he’d spent centuries ignoring. With them gone the TARDIS had been his only real form of telepathic companionship, and now that she’s gone there’s only a ringing silence. He finds himself scrambling to remember the intricacies of her comforting song, panicking at the possibility that he might one day forget even that last shred of home.

He stares at the computer screen in front of him, determinedly not looking at the spare dimension jumper laying one table over. There are dozens of reasons he can’t go to Donna’s universe himself. He’s meant to be dead; he can’t exactly show up at UNIT. In that universe he doesn't even exist. Any number of things could go cataclysmically wrong. Risking the multiverse in exchange for some nostalgia would be selfish and stupid and downright wrong.

Still, Donna and the TARDIS. It’s tempting, if only for the chance to say a proper goodbye.

Of course, he’s never been particularly good at those, either.

With a quiet sigh, the Doctor digs the heels of his hands into his eyes and wills himself to focus. He’s sent Tosh home, insisting rudely that she rest because he doesn’t need the help. Rose is somewhere on the other side of the Void, ensuring the Sontaran takeover is stopped. While he waits, the Doctor struggles to sort out the timelines and fight off the emotional and mental exhaustion that hovers in the periphery of his being.

It’s been a very long day. For the first time he can recall he wants nothing more than to curl up on the nearest surface and sleep; he suspects it must be the work of Donna, or at least his new hybrid physiology. The adrenaline in his system is diluted now, giving purchase to the anxieties he’s been doing his best to ignore.

One heart, one lifetime and one planet to spend it on. He feels strangely claustrophobic at thought, as though Earth is far too small. He misses the TARDIS, resents the quiet in his mind, and the thought of spending the next forty or fifty years in a single linear timeline terrifies him. He doesn’t know how to live in one time and place, with carpets and doors and rooms the same size inside and out. He doesn’t know how to be human.

What scares him most of all is that Rose doesn’t want him.

The rest of it, it would be manageable if not for that. That scares him to the core. What if she never forgives him for trapping her on this planet? What if she never sees him as anything beyond a consolation prize? What if she sees him as nothing more than an obligation and stays with him out of guilt?

What if she never loves him?

Oh, shut it, he can imagine Donna saying. Sitting around mooning over Rose isn’t helping anything. There’ll be plenty of time to do that once you’re done saving the multiverse, so get your skinny arse in gear and get me the hell back to Shan Shen.

With a final pinch of the bridge of his nose, he forces himself to focus. For a quarter of an hour he works with a single-minded concentration, hacking away at the Cannon and its computer to smooth out the timelines to figure out when and where he’ll have to send Rose.

And then he freezes, a sickly cold feeling of dread spreading from his spine out to his limbs. “No,” he says to himself, blankly at first and then more frantic. “No, no, no, no, no, no.” At one hundred words per minute he taps away at the keyboard, determined to find an alternative. “Come on!” Again and again he reworks the machine, determined to rearrange the timelines to reach a more acceptable outcome.

Again and again, he fails. No matter what he does, the timelines end the same way.

Snarling with frustration and anger, the Doctor kicks the base of the Cannon and only manages to hurt his foot. He yelps and leaps backwards, steadying himself against the desk and breathing heavily. He closes his eyes and swallows hard, his right hand gripping the desk so tightly his fingers ache.

Donna Noble would have to die.

\--

Rose arrives back in Torchwood — her Torchwood, not Jack’s — with the crackle of light and electricity she’s finally growing used to.

Visiting Jack did her good, she thinks. She’d slept, for one, had slumped over with exhaustion on Jack’s shoulder and woken to his familiar, indomitable grin. He was a Jack who knew her, and in-between working with his team to build the atmospheric converter, they’d had a chance to talk. She’d stopped herself from saying much of substance — who knew, after all, what the wrong word might do? — but simply joking with Jack had lightened her spirits. He’d put on a warm and cheerful persona despite the way the world had been crumbling around them, and Rose is determined to latch onto that feeling of affection and security rather than dwell on the fact that she’ll never see Jack — any Jack — ever again.

Feeling heartened for the first time in longer than she cares to think about, Rose scans the room for the Doctor, eager to get back to work while still on an emotional high. “Torchwood’s all set to take down the Sontarans, they…” She trails off as she spots him, collapsed in a chair in front of the computer.

He looks terrible. Slumped in his chair, he contemplates the screen with his chin in his hand, totally still. He looks tired in every way possible, and Rose wonders if he’ll need more sleep now, if his part-human body lacks the stamina of a Time Lord. It’s bizarre, seeing a man who looks like the Doctor so drained of the frenetic energy she’s come to associate with suits and trainers. Guiltily, she wonders if he’s looked like that all night and she’s only noticed now.

Her eyes finish their sweep of the room and she shifts uncomfortably when she finds they’re alone. “Where’s Tosh?”

“Sent her home,” he says, finally looking in her direction. “She was tired.” He shrugs. “I don’t need the help.”

Rose snorts despite herself. “Yeah, you always say that.”

The Doctor stays quiet. He lifts his head from his chin and wipes one hand over his eyes, peering forward at the computer screen. Normally, Rose thinks, he’d be wearing the brainy specs. If he still had them.

“Right,” he goes on, and Rose can hear him trying and failing to put some energy in that tone. “You need to talk to Donna again — we can send you in while the Sontarans are attacking; you can make sure she’s safe and work on convincing…” He trails off to yawn, and looks surprised when he does. “…convincing her to help you.”

“Yeah.” She holds back a yawn herself and heads for the door. “You figure that out, I’ll get us some coffee.”

He only makes a faint noise of agreement as she steps into the hall. Rose finds she’s too tired to be angry.

++

“Thanks.” The Doctor holds her eye for only a moment as she shoves the paper cup into his hands, then he drops his gaze to coffee. He takes an experimental sip and wrinkles his nose. “It’s —“

“Black,” Rose says, nodding. “Yeah. Sorry. I brought…” She trails off, reaching into her pocket and tossing a handful of sugars, creams and milks onto the table. “I wasn’t sure if you still… I thought it’d be better if I let you do it yourself.”

For a second she thinks he looks hurt, but then he flashes her a smile and reaches forward. “Right. Yeah. ‘Course.”

Rose is unfairly relieved when he takes his customary two sugars.

He settles back in his chair, cradling the cup in both hands, and Rose takes a seat on the table, watching him and drinking her coffee. She finds it eerie, how quiet he’s being. The proper Doctor, when he was upset, he babbled and babbled to try and hide it. This Doctor avoids her eyes and sips his coffee in silence, looking for all the world like a schoolboy paired with someone he despises. She bristles at the thought; it isn’t as though any of this was her idea.

Or maybe, whispers a guilty voice inside her, you’ve just broken him down. He’d been babbling in Norway, and most of the evening since — maybe her cool disinterest has worn away at him. Maybe her fortifications were so strong he’d accepted defeat and retreated back, tail between his legs.

Her stomach does a flip that has nothing to do with hunger.

“She’s going to die,” he says suddenly, just as Rose has made up her mind to say something.

It throws her. “What?”

“Donna,” he explains. His coffee cup creaks in protest as he tightens his grip on it. “She’s going to die. She has to die, to fix it, I can’t — I tried — there’s no other way.” The desperation as he says it would unnerve her, if she were listening.

But she’s stuck on the content rather than the delivery, her eyes widening. “What?” She blinks, and her stomach does another somersault. “You mean — when that world is gone–”

“No.” He smiles ruefully and shakes his head, staring again at the coffee in his cup. “Before everything is fixed, Donna, that Donna, she’s going to die.”

A few heavy seconds go by as Rose considers his words. She swallows, her throat suddenly dry. Realisation hits, and she feels cold even under her jacket. “I’ve got to ask her to die for me.”

“Specifically,” the Doctor says, his voice low and muted with self-loathing, “you’ve got to ask her to die for me.” He chuckles morbidly and looks at the ceiling. “Even in a universe where she’s never met me I’m ruining her life.”

“Hey,” she says sharply, and he looks over at her. “Ruining her life?” She lifts her eyebrows. “Did you see her on the TARDIS? She looked pretty ecstatic to me.”

Rather than seeming heartened by her words, he deflates even more. “It’ll kill her.” The look on his face reminds her of the Crucible. “All that knowledge — it’s too much for a human brain. To save her life he’ll wipe her mind of all of it — not just the physics and the timelines but him, me, the TARDIS, travelling, everything.” He lowers his eyes to study his cup. “She’ll forget.”

“But that’s... that’s terrible!” The queasiness in Rose’s stomach lurches again. “She’s gone?”

The Doctor only nods.

The implication hits her. “He’s alone.”

He nods again.

All at once the uneasy feeling in her stomach turns to anger. “And you knew that would happen.” She can picture it perfectly, the two Doctors sitting around and planning it. You take Rose, I’ll wipe Donna’s memories, how does that sound? The thought makes her sick. She wonders if Donna even got a say in it, or if the Doctor had merely and as always made the decision for her.

She opens her mouth to tell him this, to let loose a long-suppressed rant about his tendency to assume he knows best, but something in the hunch of his shoulders makes her hesitate. He looks miserable and exhausted, and she suspects his conscience is doing a better job of berating him than even she could manage. So she shuts her mouth and turns to stare furiously out the doorway, wishing for a better outlet for her anger.

“It’s my fault,” he says after a moment. It’s barely a whisper, but it catches her attention. He looks away from her, stares at the Dimension Cannon with wide, sad eyes. “My creation, my existence, it… doomed her.” She doesn’t know what to say, and the Doctor looks down at the floor.

The admission surprises her, though she’s not sure why. It’s such a Doctor thing, thinking of himself as less important than someone else, a relic of his paradoxical self-love and self-loathing. Same memories, same thoughts, same guilt complex the size of Jupiter.

“That’s so like you,” she says, and she almost smiles from the truth of it even as he turns to stare at her questioningly. “You take the blame but you hardly ever take the credit. You saved her life, Doctor. And if you hadn’t, there’d’ve been no one to stop the Reality Bomb. We needed you.”

His return smile is weak and sad and a touch condescending. “It should’ve been me. If the metacrisis had to fail on one end…” He shrugs and looks back at his coffee. “The universe already has a Doctor.”

She doesn’t let herself think about how that might have simplified things, how maybe then she could have stayed on the TARDIS with the Doctor and Donna. Instead, she wonders. Does he regret his own creation? Does he resent his single heart and the brand new lifestyle it means? Does he resent her, for being part of that?

She tries to imagine what it must be like, being born with the weight of the universe on your shoulders. She wonders if it was easier for him when his people were alive, if they’d shared that burden of knowledge and power between themselves and lessened it that way. She wonders what it must be like to wake up a different species. She wonders what it would be like to learn she’s not the real Rose Tyler, just a very, very good imitation — a less durable version full of hand-me-down memories.

It would be hard, she reckons. Damn near impossible, even if you’re used to being the universe’s pincushion.

Born in battle, the other Doctor had said. Full of blood and anger and revenge. He’s me, when we first met.

He was only half-right, Rose thinks. When they met he’d been angry, yes, but more than that he’d been desperately sad and lonely and crippled with guilt.

You made me better.

She swallows her anger and strengthens her resolve.

“Listen to me, Doctor,” she says, firm enough that he looks up at her. “It’s not your fault. Some people die because of you, yeah, but so many more get to live.”

The Doctor looks at her uncertainly, his mouth opening and closing as he hesitates to say whatever it is he’s biting back — words of gratitude or modesty or disagreement, she’s not sure. Instinctively she reaches forward, her hand coming to rest along his arm. The gesture startles him, and Rose feels a glimmer of guilt. Such a mild show of affection should not surprise him.

“The people I care about always get hurt,” he tells her after a moment, his eyes trained on her hand. “Because of me, because they met me, because of the situations I put them in.”

With the warmest smile she can manage, Rose squeezes his arm. “Occupational hazard of saving the universe. It’s worth it.” He meets her eyes and her expression turns earnest. “The years I spent on the TARDIS were the best of my life. I wouldn’t trade them for anything.”

The smile he sends her seems resigned. “Yeah.” Then, evidently energised, he leaps to his feet and knocks back his remaining coffee. “Well then, like you said, universes to save!” He tosses the cup into the bin without looking and crosses the room to the Dimension Cannon in a few long strides. “You ready?”

Sliding off the table, Rose nods, feeling dazed. “Yeah…. yeah, sure.”

“Molto bene!” he says, and Rose is sure he’s lying through his teeth.

\--

Donna jumps up from the park bench. She feels nauseous and angry and helpless. “Stop it. I don't know what you're talking about, leave me alone!”

The woman rises, turning to face her, her eyes large and dark, blonde hair whipping around her face in the breeze. She looks much worse than when she last saw her, more careworn somehow, less confident. “Something's coming, Donna. Something worse.”

Frustrated tears well up in Donna’s eye. What does this woman want? Why does she keep searching her out? Donna doesn’t need to know these things, doesn’t want to know them. She has enough to worry about in this bloody apocalyptic mess without thinking about dead men and skies that burst into flame. “The whole world is stinking. How can anything be worse than this?”

The blonde shakes her head, her lower lip trembling just a bit, the only tell to the emotion she must be feeling. “Trust me. We need the Doctor more than ever. I've --” She pauses and places her hand over heart. “I've been pulled across from a different universe, because every single universe is in danger. It's coming, Donna. It's coming from across the stars and nothing can stop it.”

More vague answers and riddles, and Donna wants to scream.“What is?”

“The Darkness.”

The darkness? It sounds like some horrible cartoon villain, or something out of one of those sci-fi novels her Gramps reads. Donna almost laughs until she sees the look in the blonde’s eyes. “Well, what do you keep telling ME for? WHAT am I supposed to do? I'm nothing special. I mean, I'm-- I'm not-- I'm nothing special, I'm a temp. I'm not even that, I'm NOTHING.”

The woman shakes her head, almost as if she’s amused, but her tone is exasperated.  
“Donna Noble, you're the most important woman in the whole of creation.”

Donna laughs, a short harsh laugh. “Oh, don't. Just...” She shakes her head, the smile fading from her face, anger and disbelief draining out of her until all there is left to feel is fatigue. “Don't. I'm tired. I'm so... tired.”

She turns to leave, but the woman calls out to her again. “I need you to come with me.”

Donna smirks. “Yeah. Well. Blonde hair might work on the men, but you ain't shifting me, lady.”

“That's more like it.”

“I've got plenty more.”

The blonde shrugs. “I know you'll come with me. Only when you want to.”

“You'll have a long wait, then,” Donna retorts, and starts to walk away.

“Not really” the woman chirps, “just three weeks. Tell me, does your grandfather still own that telescope?”

Again, Donna turns back, “He never lets go of it.”

“Three weeks time. But you've got to be certain. Because, when you come with me, Donna... sorry... so sorry, but... you're going to die.”

Donna stares at her. Before her eyes, the woman fades away.

\--

Captain Erisa Magambo shifts from one foot to the other. She keeps her hands clasped tightly behind her back. She is nervous, but it won’t do for any of her men to see it. UNIT has lost more than half its forces in the last year and they have been through enough. It is her duty to be unflappable, the perfect soldier, and that is what she intends to do, until the end.

Of course, Magambo thinks, the end could be relatively soon. It seems the whole world, the entire universe, rests on the shoulders of two women -- a young blonde with a secret name and a loudmouthed ginger temp from Chiswick.

“So what do you think of the miss, then?” Donna Noble inclines her head towards the blonde that is currently hunched over one of the computer terminals, nose pressed close to the glowing screen.

Magambo turns and looks at the redhead who is now looking at her expectantly, a cup of steaming coffee in hand.

“She’s my superior officer,” she replies tersely. This is a lie. The blonde isn’t even an official member of UNIT but Magambo has been ordered to do as she says, within limit of course.

“Oi! Don’t give me that rubbish, I’m helping you lot, I want the truth. You have to know something about her.” Donna gestures at the blonde, hot coffee nearly sloshing over the brim of her cup. “She can’t have just suddenly appeared and started telling you lot to build her things.”

Magambo shifts again, uncomfortable with the fact that that is exactly what had happened nearly a year and a half ago. Since then the woman had appeared sporadically, often showing up with hand drawn diagrams of what exactly needed to be built -- layouts of circuit boards, intricate charts of wiring inked in multi-coloured pens, long detailed notes scribbled in the margins.

Donna continues talking, ignoring or oblivious to Magambo’s silence. “It’s mad,” she’s saying, “but she seems familiar somehow, like I know her, almost, or someone like her.” Donna’s eyes are far away, as if she is trying to remember something that she has forgotten, or never really knew. “Do you think she was in love with him?”

“I’m sorry?”

Donna rolls her eyes and takes another sip of coffee. “This Doctor, d’you think she was in love with him?”

Magambo purses her lips, a thin line of disapproval folding her forehead. “That is hardly relevant to the mission.”

Donna shrugs, once again looking over her shoulder at the mysterious woman in blue leather. “I reckon she was. You can always tell.” She turns back to Magambo, eyes wide. “It’s wild, all this stuff, isn’t it? Aliens and time travel. My gramps is always going on about spaceships and life on distant planets. ‘Course I never listened, not ‘till all this stuff started happening…” She trails off, then shakes herself. “Still... do you trust her?”

Magambo blinks, surprised. Her eyes flicker to the blonde woman who is still staring at the computer screen and then to the TARDIS and then back to Donna Noble, who is staring at her, eyes narrowed, nostrils slightly flared, as if she is daring the other woman to lie to her.

She should say yes immediately, because that is what a good soldier does, but something about the blonde has always set her on edge. There is a something reckless and a little bit wild about her that Magambo innately disapproves of. And there is the mystery of course, a woman with no name who appears and disappears at will bearing cryptic messages about stars and multi-verses.

But Donna doesn’t need to hear her doubts, certainly doesn’t need to think about why this woman with sad eyes knows how and why all of this was going to happen.

She has seen many things in the past year and a half and as far as he knows the blonde has always told the truth about what must be done to save the universe. She has watched her be charming, cold, jovial, brilliant, and stern in order to get her way. And she has seen the projected timelines, how they arch and bend around the redhead sitting beside her, as if everything about the world is centered on her very existence. She knows and even believes that somehow the fate of the entire planet is tied up in this one seemingly ordinary woman’s life.

But she has also seen the mushroom cloud hovering over London, she has watched America’s dissolution into crisis, and she has seen the entire sky set on fire. She has seen people shot in the street by the soldiers meant to be protecting them and she has watched helplessly as the government set up internment camps for foreigners. And she can’t help but think that the blonde has held back information, not always told them the whole truth or even a small part of it.

Magambo is an excellent soldier; she knows when to tell the truth, when to keep her mouth shut, and when to lie.

“Yes, I trust her.”

\--

“He was a Time Lord,” the blonde woman says, sad and melancholy again, “last of his kind.”

Time Lord, Donna thinks. Sounds pompous and mystical and entirely unlike the sot of person who might befriend a temp from Chiswick. “But if he's so special, what's he doing with me?”

The woman’s stare is sad and unnervingly sincere. “He thought you were brilliant.”

Said like that, it almost sounds true. Donna shakes her head. “Don't be stupid.”

“Well, you are! It just took the Doctor to show you that, simply by being with him.” The woman looks away, looks down at the strange controls of this impossible machine. “He did the same to me. To everyone he touches.”

Time Lords and time travel or not, Donna knows that look, and finally she finds the nerve to ask the question she’s been holding back for some time, now. “Were you and him...?”

The woman looks at her, and Donna desperately hopes for an answer, some sort of confirmation that the mysterious, never-changing blonde with no name is more than merely the bearer of bad news. Instead, the woman stays silent, as when her eyes drift from Donna’s face to her shoulder, the woman asks, “Do you want to see it?”


	4. Chapter 4

Rose feels shaky, nervous. She supposes that’s hardly surprising given what’s about to happen, what’s already happened if things go to plan. She has put a lot of effort into appearing confident these last few days, but here, standing in the thin watery sunlight of early spring, she can feel herself beginning to pull apart. She is flaking away, crumbling, and underneath her hard enamel facade, there is menace, chaos, cities aflame, bright twisted skyscrapers crashing down, anarchy... and doubt. 

This world is about to blink out of existence, become a poorly remembered dream. The new fresh leaves of the trees glow neon green against the frosted grey of the sky. The air around her is soft and translucent, the pavement underneath her boots twinkles pale pink. It all seems solid enough, but if she squints, narrows her vision, she can almost see through it, as if this reality is already fading. Her legs are wobbly and the street wavers. The weak sunlight blows away like smoke. 

Rose wonders exactly what Donna will remember. Enough, obviously, to give the Doctor Rose’s message. Bad Wolf. It’s almost a mystical term to her, a golden phrase from her previous life, when she was younger, more impulsive, untried, unbroken. It seems almost cruel that it should show up again now — now, after she has crossed so many universes hoping to see it. She’s analyzed every child’s chalk drawing, every line of graffiti, advertisements, and toilet stalls. She’s even walked into a hotel once and looked at the guest book, studied the scrawled row of names and dates. She had longed for those two words, yearned for them, as if they could replace the three that she had never had the chance to hear. 

Rose knows she is not magical, not omnipotent. She can no longer see the future or the past. She will not live forever; her brief brush with the eternal has not granted her immortality. She is a woman, human, transient. When she thinks about her life so far, she is always shocked by how ludicrous is all seems, how much like a fairytale. Ordinary shop girl falls in love with an exiled prince, the last of his kind, only to be torn from his side by the spiteful hands of time and chance. Ridiculous. 

She looks at her watch, and the little red numbers glare back at her. Not time yet. 

She likes Donna, genuinely, even though she knows the woman doesn’t truly trust her, probably doesn’t even particularly like her. Still, Rose feels protective of her, and just a little jealous. She’s going back to the Doctor, after all, something that Rose has been trying to do for years. 

But Donna won’t be able to stay with him, though, will she? That’s what the other Doctor had said, that she would have to forget. Forget everything. Rose can think of nothing worse. After Torchwood and that horrible day at Bad Wolf Bay, memories had been the only thing she had to cling to. Donna would not even have that. Her life with the Doctor, everything she’d seen and done, would simply be erased, snuffed out like a candle, much like this universe.

Rose thinks about the Doctor and how he will feel once he has lost yet another friend, and about the other Doctor, the blue suited one whom she has left behind in the other universe. He’s orchestrated so much of what she’s done in this world, worked tirelessly to set things right. When she thinks about him, something moves restlessly in her stomach, something new, green and soft and young. 

Given half the chance, she thinks, maybe that feeling could grow, but she is so unsure. There’s guilt there, and maybe love — but is it the same? Can she feel the same love for the man in the strange blue suit as she does for the man in brown? He loves her, she knows. Is he what she’s been running towards all this time?

A blue lorry rumbles by and Rose braces herself. The air crystallizes, time seems to slow. There is the hot screech of brakes and a woman’s shrill, terrified scream. 

\--

Donna opens her eyes. It is effort to do even that. She feels heavy, but surprisingly there is no pain. She hadn’t expected that. 

A figure looms over her, blocking out the glare of the sun. Her face is shadowed, features nearly unrecognizable. The blonde leans down, strands of hair falling across her face. Her breath is heavy and warm in Donna’s ear. “Tell him this: two words.”

\--

When Rose makes it back to Torchwood, she looks drained.

Almost done, the Doctor wants to tell her, and then you can go home. Instead he hunches over the computer screen, watching as the timelines twist and converge and fold in on themselves, his left foot tapping with a nervous energy. The machines are going haywire, struggling to cope with one reality collapsing at the same time dimensional retroclosure begins.

Soon they’ll stop working at all, so he’ll have to act quickly.

“One last trip,” he tells Rose as he bounds across to the Dimension Cannon to tweak something on its console. “The walls will close soon, again — properly, this time — though I’ve said that before, haven’t I? — but we ought to make sure everything’s back on track. A quick peek to make sure the stars are where there supposed to be, that’s all.”

He doesn’t look at her, but in his peripheral vision he can see the way Rose freezes, her shoulders suddenly tense, her back a little straighter. 

“Back…” She hesitates and takes a breath. “Back in the other universe, you mean,” 

The Doctor busies himself with the Dimension Cannon a few seconds longer than is necessary. “Yep. ” 

“Right,” she says quietly. He glances over just in time to see her turn, angling her body and her face away from him.

“I’ve set it so the Cannon will bring you back before the walls seal off for good,” he explains as he straightens. He watches her back and the way her shoulders stay tight and tense. “You won’t have to do anything — the Cannon, it’ll sense it, bring you back before it’s too late.”

Her blonde hair bobs as she nods once.

The Doctor pauses. He studies her -- the shape of her silhouette, the sheen of her hair, the set of her shoulders, the dip of her waist — and he wills every detail into his brilliant Time Lord memory. He lets out a deep breath and swallows.

“’Course, you could turn it off. Your jumper, I mean, you could turn it off and then it wouldn’t be able to bring you back because — well, because it’s off.” It’s less than eloquent, as far as sentences go, and he’s tugging at his ear when Rose turns to look at him.

Her eyes narrow as she thinks it through. “You mean if I turned it off I could… stay.”

He nods, and gives her a grin. “Yep. Well, I mean, if you wanted to, yeah. Up to you.”

Her eyes widen slowly as the implications sink in. “I can go back.”

“Yep.” He rocks on his heel, still smiling, and then bounds over to the computer, prattling away and waving one hand as he adjusts the controls. “Unfortunately I can’t guarantee much accuracy this time — it’s a pretty big event, what you just did, and that combined with the timelines converging on Donna and dimensional retroclosure, it’s all a bit… tangled. But I should be able to get you close, or close enough. Might have some time to kill, if you stay, but it shouldn’t be too bad.” He looks up just long enough to raise his eyebrows and broaden his grin. “You convinced UNIT to make you a time machine without even telling them your name, that’s not bad.” 

Rose stays rooted to the spot. “What about you?”

The Doctor keeps his eyes trained on the screen. “Me? Nah, don’t worry about me!” His hand waves as he says it, shooting for flippancy.

“You’re staying.” There’s something in her voice he can’t place — guilt, maybe, or sympathy. 

He nods, still staring at the computer. The whole scenario reminds him uncomfortably of trying to send her away at Canary Wharf, but he pushes the recollection aside. That was different. This is what she wants, what she really wants, rather than his own interpretation of what will be best for her. 

He shoves himself upright and away from the desk, shoving his hands in his pockets. “All set! We ought to hurry, I’m not sure exactly how long the breach will last, so–”

“You’re sending me away.” She doesn’t sound surprised, either, which he thinks is the worst part. 

He holds back a groan. “No. Rose — no. I’m giving you a choice. That’s all.”

She doesn’t seem to be listening. She smiles — a watery, false sort of smile — and shakes her head. “The two of you keep trying to pawn me off on each other.” 

“That’s not–”

“He left me.” She smiles again but looks down at the floor. “I spent years trying to find him and he didn’t even say goodbye.”

She looks dejected, and the Doctor isn’t sure what to do. It’s not him she’s talking about, but then he’d certainly not helped matters. He’d known from the start that Rose wouldn’t be exactly overjoyed with the circumstances; seeing the aftermath first hand only makes him regret the situation further. He needs to explain, needs Rose to understand.

“He didn’t want to leave you behind.” She doesn’t raise her head, and the Doctor presses on. “Rose, he — he loves you.”

“I know.”

She looks at him then, and the Doctor, uncomfortable with the sensation that she can see straight through him, looks away. He clears his throat, eager to steer away from the subject and eager to finish this as quick as he can. Quick and easy, like a bandage.

“As I was saying, we ought to hurry. The breach isn’t likely to last long, and–”

“Come with me,” she says suddenly, and the Doctor’s stomach does a terrible flop.

It’s almost tempting. Rose Tyler on the TARDIS — he wants it so much it’s a physical ache. 

But the prospect of sharing that, of feeling out of place even in the TARDIS, of spending the rest of his life as ‘the other Doctor’ —

He’d had a glimpse of that, just after the Crucible. In the TARDIS it was the first Doctor everyone had looked to for direction, and it was the first Doctor who’d seen everyone off as they went home. Even Donna had seen him as someone different, not quite the Time Lord she knew; just wait for the Doctor, she’d said. He can imagine the scenario repeating itself dozens of times, his own authority and influence and importance undermined by the presence of a man who is just like him, only better. I’m the Doctor, this is Rose, and this is what happens when you keep a hand in a jar for too long. 

Living in his own shadow sounds like a daunting task. 

So he smiles. “I can’t.” It comes out heavier than he means it to, sounds just a bit too much like a plea. 

Her lips pull down into a frown. “Why not?”

He waves the question aside and turns back to the computer, though in truth there’s nothing left to do but press the button. “Someone’s got to push the buttons, haven’t they? And if I’ve sent Torchwood’s best operative to a different universe I suppose it’s only fair I stick around and give them a hand.” He grins lopsidedly at her for just a second. He sees her open her mouth to protest, so he carries on, returning his attention to the monitor. “Besides, like I said. A universe only needs one Doctor.”

She doesn’t have an answer to that.

He turns to face her and combs one hand back through his hair, determined to maintain complete composure until she’s gone. The very last thing he wants is for Rose to stay with him out of obligation and guilt, like he’s a pet she’s agreed to take care of. “Don’t worry about me, anyway, I’ll be fine.” He smiles tightly. “I’ve got to send you now, Rose, while I still can.”

“Yeah.” Her fists clench and unclench at her sides. She looks like she might cry.

The Doctor meets her eyes and fixes his smile in place.

It’s easier this way — easier to lock her away in another universe than to keep her with him. It’s easier to tell himself she’ll be happy where he can’t see it than to risk witnessing the opposite. It’s easier to lose her to another man than to spend the rest of his life with her right there, not wanting him.

It’ll be easier, he suspects, though it will still be hell.

He leans down to the computer, his hand hovering over the key that will send her back across the Void and back to the Time Lord with the blue box. She’ll decide to stay there, he knows; faced with a life of adventure and travel with the real deal and a few decades of carpets and mortgages with a copy, she’ll make the obvious choice. He won’t blame her, can’t blame her, will never resent her for getting the life she wants.

He’ll miss her, though.

“There’s… there’s a letter, in my office,” she’s saying. and he can hear her struggling to keep her voice level. “For my family, in case…”

He nods, finding his smile has disappeared despite his best efforts. “I’ll give it to them.” 

An awkward silence settles between them, and the Doctor thinks that if this is the last time he’ll ever see Rose Tyler, he ought to make it good. He ought to hug her, ought to memorise the feel of her, ought to repeat the sentence he’d held back for so long.

Instead he stays where he is and smiles at her, weak but sincere. “Good luck, Rose.”

Rose bites her lip. She starts towards him and hesitates, her eyes soft with confusion and concern. “Doctor…” she begins, and the Doctor hits the key beneath his fingers.

She disappears with a flash. He stares at the spot where she’d been, then closes his eyes and bows his head. At least, the Doctor supposes, there are only a few decades left in his new lifespan. Not a long time to be lonely at all, in comparison.

\--

Rose flashes into reality, her feet braced wide to steady herself. She has jumped so many times in the last few days that it hardly affects her now, her body is used to it. She shakes her arms, dispelling the lingering electric energy that is running up and down her limbs. 

There is a large crowd in front of her, but no one notices her sudden appearance, all too busy gaping at the scene in front of them. White plastic barriers cordon off a section of pavement in front of her, where a woman’s body lies broken, splayed in the middle of the street. For one horrible moment, Rose thinks she is about to watch as Donna is packed into an ambulance and driven away. But the woman is blonde not ginger, and it is nighttime, not morning. There is no blue lorry, just a gathering of police cars, gawkers, and a few reporters who are randomly pulling people aside asking them a barrage a questions about what has just happened. 

Rose breathes a sigh of relief and looks up at the sky, which is thankfully thickly peppered with stars. 

Her pocket beeps and she pulls out her TARDIS detector, once again flashing red. The Doctor is somewhere nearby. Déjà vu rushes over her, making her head spin. Was it only days ago that she was faced with this same decision? She could run, find him, explain everything… 

She is angry, so angry with both of them, for presuming to know what she needs or what she wants. First he had left her on that beach, passing her off on his double, and now he has pressed a button and sent her away, not even giving her a choice, assuming she’s already decided. 

She softens, her shoulders slumping. He is giving her a choice, though, isn’t he? She wants to stamp her foot, cry, maybe throw something or slap someone. 

What does she want? A life of running and danger? Had she loved the life or the man or had she been too mixed up in it all to understand the difference? What if she could have one without the other, just the man and all his eccentricities? 

She could have all of him, go to sleep next to him at night, wake up by his side in the morning. There would be running, no doubt… trouble has a knack for finding the Doctor, and she doubts that’ll change now… but it would be different, wouldn’t it? He could let himself love her; no more choosing between Rose Tyler and the rest of the universe. And isn’t she all he has left, really? What would his life be without the TARDIS, without a universe to protect, without even her to hold his hand? A universe only needs one Doctor. She can’t fault him for that, either; she realizes now that most would only ever see him as second best, a backup in case of emergency, an expendable part to do the dirty work. Hadn’t she been guilty of that very same reasoning? 

There’s a man who needs her, a man in a blue suit who still takes two sugars in his coffee and looks at her with longing, a man who’d been willing to lose the life he loved just for her. 

But there’s another man, too, an impossible man with two hearts and the universe weighing him down. He needs her too, doesn’t he? Hadn’t he said as much on that beach? Hadn’t he proved as much under the Thames? She had meant it when she told him that she would stay with him forever, but she’d been younger, then, less conscious of her own mortality. She can see it clearly, now, the thing he’d always feared most -- that no matter what course their lives together took, she would always leave him before either of them were ready. Is that why he’d left her behind? Is this ending kinder than that? 

The TARDIS detector continues to flash in her hand, beckoning, calling her back to a life she’d lost twice now. She could do it -- find him, step back into the TARDIS, travel, see the universe, hold his hand. Or… 

There is a beep from her other pocket and she reaches in to pull out the yellow dimension hopper, fully charged, ready, waiting to take her back to the man in blue who surely thinks she’s gone for good. She shakes her head and returns both devices to her jacket. 

How is she supposed to choose one over the other? 

She remembers a conversation she had, so long ago now it seems like it happened in another life. Stranded on Krop Tor, no TARDIS, no way home… 

Stuck with you, that’s not so bad. 

She has somehow drifted up to the police barricade. There are still people standing around her, but most have started to walk away, muttering about aliens and diet pills.

A familiar voice cuts through the shuffle of the crowd and Rose finds herself turning, coming face to face with a familiar redhead who is talking loudly into a cell phone. 

“Oh, stop complaining, the car's just down the road a bit. Got to go, really got to go. Bye.” The woman clicks the phone shut, sliding into her pocket.

Rose isn’t even surprised when Donna steps up to her, her cheeks flushed with excitement. There is no recognition in her gaze and Rose knows that the woman has no idea who she is. 

“Listen,” Donna tells her, “there’s this woman that's going to come along, a tall blonde woman called Sylvia, tell her that bin there. Right, it'll all make sense. That bin there.” 

Donna jogs away and Rose turns her back. Her throat is burning and she can feel tears starting to well up in her eyes. She looks up, forcing the tears back. This is her decision, her choice, her life. Red or yellow, brown or blue, monsters or mortgages.

She takes a deep breath and then lets it out, patting her pockets to feel the weight of both devices. The dimension hopper is still on, and she can feel the pull of the canon starting to tug at her, guiding her back to another universe, where a new life awaits her. 

She slips a hand into her jacket, clutching the TARDIS detector tightly before she pulls it out and lets it slip from her fingers. It hits the pavement and cracks open, spilling out a jumble of wires and a key, which glows golden briefly and then fades back to silver. She hopes he will forgive her, hopes he will find someone else to make brilliant, someone else to share the whole of time and space with. 

Rose turns and walks away. 

\--

The Doctor leans back in Tosh’s chair, staring at the ceiling of the Torchwood lab. Every ounce of energy seems to have drained from his body. His arms and legs feel heavy and cumbersome, and his hands lie open and limp in his lap. 

There are many things he should do. He should stand and start to shut down the array of machines that are useless now, trains without tracks. He should find Rose’s office and the letter for her family. He should contact Jackie and Pete and Tony and let them know they’re back to being a family of three. He should find somewhere he can sleep and begin the long road of recuperating his energy. He should come up with a plan, figure out what in the world he’s going to do for the next half-century.

He can’t seem to pick himself up from the chair. To do any of those things would be to accept that Rose is gone, and though he knows that, feels it in every inch of his being, he wants to linger just a little longer in the space between acknowledgment and action. Once he moves he’ll have to move on, begin the terrifying adventure of living linearly… alone. As soon as he stands, he’ll take Rose and Donna and the TARDIS and all the rest and shove them to the back of his mind, relegate them to the same distant, dusty corner that he keeps memories of Gallifrey and the Time War and the year that wasn’t. He’ll throw himself into Torchwood with reckless abandon and he’ll push himself harder and harder. He’ll stretch himself so thin he won’t have time to notice the ghosts that will follow him for the rest of his human life.

But not quite yet. For just a few more minutes, he wants to mourn.

The corner of his mouth lifts up in a small pained smile; Jackie is going to kill him. Pete too, and Tony — Tony would grow up without the chance to know his brilliant older sister. It’s not fair to them that they lose her, and the Doctor wonders if Jackie will ever forgive him for not being good enough to keep Rose. He wonders if he’ll ever forgive himself.

But she’ll be happy, he thinks, repeating it like a mantra over and over in his head. Rose will be happy, and that’s the important thing, really, the most important thing. It’s a relief, a pleasant alternative to the knowledge he was making her miserable. It’s all he’s wanted, all he’s aimed for since he met her. It’s enough, it has to be. Making Rose Tyler happy has always been enough.

His eyes start to sting, so he shuts them tight. 

Just one more minute, he thinks, sixty seconds and then he’ll force himself back to work. He keeps his eyes closed and wills his heart to stop pounding. He ignores the crackle of electricity he hears across the room just as he ignores the sudden compulsion to curl into a ball and escape into sleep.

It’s not until he feels the hand on his shoulder that his eyes snap open, instantly seeking out the familiar face that looms above him. He blinks twice to make sure he’s not imagining her. “Rose?”

The corners of her mouth tilt up in a small smile and she lifts her hand from his shoulder. “Hi.”

He gapes at her, his mind reeling as it tries to explain her presence back in Torchwood. He bolts upright and tries to shake away the confusion and fatigue clouding his mind, without much success. Rubbing his eyes with his index finger and thumb, he looks from Rose to the computer and back again. “What is it? Is there something wrong? Did something go wrong?”

“Everything’s fine,” Rose says, and his brain screeches to a halt at another dead end. “I saw Donna. She seemed happy, I think she was with you.”

For a long moment the Doctor is silent. “Then why….” He trails off as he’s forced to confront the seemingly impossible truth, a possibility he never allowed himself to hope for. He struggles to find his voice. “You came back.”

Her eyes are somber as she nods, as though she only seems to realize the truth in his words as he speaks. “Yeah.” 

The question is out of his mouth before he can stop himself. “Why?”

Rose smiles this time, soft and sincere. “Said I’d never leave you, didn’t I?” And then she shrugs, just barely lifting her shoulders. “You gave me a choice. That’s something he never quite got the hang of.”

There’s more to it than that, he’s sure, but prying seems inconsiderate, so instead he stares at her, completely thrown, completely incapable of stringing together a sentence. He should thank her. He should tell her how grateful he is, what this means to him, how sorry he is for making her choose. He should explain to her the way fifty years on the slow path doesn’t seem quite so terrifying if she’s by his side. 

All he manages to say is her name.

The smile on her lips fades, but that faint spark of light doesn’t leave her eyes. “Come on,” she says, “I’m dead tired and you look ready to pass out. It’s time we went home.”

Rose holds out her hand, and the Doctor takes it. 

\--

The Doctor looks at her for a long moment, his brow furrowed. “Sometimes I think there's way too much coincidence around you, Donna. I met you once, I met your grandfather, then I met you again. In the whole wide universe, I met you for a second time.” His voice lowers and he tilts his head, studying her as if she’s a puzzle he can’t quite figure out. “It's like something's binding us together.”

Donna snorts, half-heartedly swatting at him, “Don't be so daft. I'm nothing special.”

“Yes, you are, you're brilliant.” 

The Doctor is looking back down at the beetle, but his tone is warm… and familiar, like déjà vu. She shuts her eyes, just for a moment, and in a flash there is a woman standing in front of her, a blonde in a blue leather coat; a woman with sad eyes and steel in her voice… 

“She said that.”

“Who did?”

“That woman.” Donna shakes her head, struggling, “I can't remember.”

The Doctor seems unconcerned. “Well, she never existed now.” 

A cold fist is gripping her stomach. There is something… something that she has to remember, but images and words are slipping past her, colors and sounds carried away by a fast flowing river. But… “No, but she said... the stars... she said the stars are going out.”

The Doctor shrugs, continuing to prod at the beetle, “Yeah, but that world's gone.”

“No, but she said it was all worlds. Every world.” Urgency is pressing down on her, but it’s as if she’s trying to dig though quicksand -- the memories are there but they are buried deep and sinking fast. “She said… ‘the darkness is coming, even here’.”

Finally the Doctor looks up at her, his mouth setting itself into a fine line. “Who was she?”

Donna shakes her head again. “I don't know.”

“What did she look like?”

“She was...” A leather jacket, a ring of mirrors, a pitch black sky, a strand of blonde hair tucked absently behind an ear… “Blonde.”

“What was her name?” The Doctor’s voice is quiet and strained; all of his attention is focused on her. 

“I don't know!” Her breath is coming quicker now, images flashing faster through her mind. 

“Donna, what was her name?” His voice is trembling, and Donna thinks that might be the most terrifying sound she has ever heard. 

She shuts her eyes again. This time a face looms over her, blurry and out of focus. Donna speaks slowly, forcing memories to the surface as she goes along. “She told me... to warn you. She said... two words.”

“What two words? What were they? What did she say?” His voice is still quiet, but it rings with suppressed urgency. He sounds almost hollow. 

There is a soft breath in her ear, a rush of sound. Donna narrows her eyes, searching the Doctor’s frantic gaze for meaning. “Bad Wolf.” 

 

FINIS.


End file.
